Friday, August 30, 2013

Door still needs sealing

The IsoDoor presents numerous difficulties to the installer because the seals and even the threshold are not initially installed, as they are with most door you buy that are intended to have seals (interior doors don't). But now that the door is installed without seals (after two days of hard work by a very experienced carpenter about my age) I did some measurements. The iPhone couldn't be found so I used a read SPL meter this time, the Galaxy recommended by (and purchased through) the Home Theater Shack. I should have been using a real SPL meter all along.

The iPhone app RTA showed almost identical A weighted and C weighted results. Well that was wrong, I see now, with the Galaxy the A and C weighted results are quite different, and my guess is that all the iPhone results, even with C weighting supposedly selected, are essentially A weighted possibly by the limitations of the hardware itself.

I say that also because the Galaxy C weighted SPL's don't show any improvement in sound reduction due to the new door over the C weighted SPL's I got with iPhone on the old hollow door. In fact, there is only 16 dB reduction between living room and bedroom NOW, according to the Galaxy. And the iPhone C weighted measurement showed 21dB reduction...with the old original lightweight door. That can't be right (and btw, it doesn't sound that way to my ears either).

Comparing A weighted measurements across the two devices, I'm seeing a useful 9dB reduction from the earlier door. Exact comparison before and after will have to wait until I find the iPhone. The new numbers A weighted are 71.3 dB in the living room and 40.9dB in the bedroom, a sound reduction of 30.4 dB. The previous iPhone A weighted measurements showed 21.5 dB of A weighted reduction with the old door.

It sounds like much more reduction than that. But when you close the new door, still lacking seals, what you hear is mostly the high frequencies. The midrange and bass are obliterated, but the extreme highs are hardly changed. So when I play pink noise it sounds like distant very high frequency hiss in the bedroom. The sound seems to be leaking around the door (but not under the bottom, which still lacks threshold but does already have the sweep).

Strangely, the extreme highs may even be attenuated less than before. That's how it sounds. It seem like the extreme hardness of the door is providing a better path for high frequencies around the door than before.

So seals will have to be added. But at the same time, the door fits very tight into the jamb and it's unclear if the seals can even be added. This is very worrisome.

It would have been far far better had Sound Isolation Store pre-mounted the seals. In fact, other sound blocking doors (typically modified metal doors) come with pre-attached seals. Such doors are either somewhat more expensive or far less attractive or both.